When I was a child we had paper maps. These maps had to be studied and read to make navigating simpler. You had to know that you would drive from A to B to C to D and so forth. In the age of Google Maps, before phone navigation we had to print out the driving instructions for the entire trip. From A go to B via this road, and that motorway.
A few days ago I was driving from Switzerland to Spain via France when Google Maps told me to get off the motorway and drive on normal roads. When it made this mistake I switched to Apple maps, and was not led astray again.
Google Maps leading me astray was a surprise. Google Maps and Waze are the same, and yet Google Maps behaved differently. I don’t understand why it led me astray.
Several years ago I needed to download TomTom and I needed the latest map updates if I wanted to drive from Switzerland to England or from Switzerland to France, or to Spain. Thanks to roaming I now have a much broader choice.
TomTom was good in another era, when we had to pay roaming fees. We downloaded the relevant maps. We set off, and the GPS would guide us from A to B and that was that.
Today with Tomtom Go you pay 20CHF per year for the maps and traffic information. When I first bought the TomTom Europe apps for iOS and Android they cost about 170CHF an operating system. If my memory serves me well traffic information would cost an additional 100 CHF per year. As a result of the high cost for traffic information I was in the habit of using Waze. As long as you have a data connection you get maps and traffic information for free.
If it’s something geeky you’ll see me learn how to use it. The most recent thing I’ve played with is the n95 8gb and google maps. This time though it was from a car rather than on foot and as a result it was far quicker to correct a mistake. I took care to locate the satellites before leaving home so that when I arrived to Lausanne I could stop by the side of the road, load google maps, press 0 and the gps in the phone would automatically locate me within 30 kilometers.